Introducing MediaWiki community metrics

The MediaWiki community includes about 506 code contributors active in the past 12 months. A total of 884 developers have contributed code to Wikimedia projects since the first MediaWiki commit in April 2003. The total sum appears to be 5,6 million lines of code written for the MediaWiki core engine, extension, mobile applications, server tools, etc.

42,016 reports have been filed to MediaWiki’s bug reporting tool since its opening in August 2004. From those, 20,057 have been fixed, 8619 are still open and 2315 never got an answer from anyone.

Brion Vibber is the top reporter with 881 bugs filed. Roan Kattouw is the top bug fixer identified with 667 reports resolved, although no less than 12,149 have been fixed by “Nobody”.

Community metrics are helpful to understand the size and scope of an open source project. Since most activities are public, it is possible to retrieve plenty of raw data. The problem is to decide what data to look for and why, and how to process and interpret it.

In our case, a short-term motivation is to describe all the activities going on in the areas of software development, testing and documentation. What projects are doing well? What projects need a push? Where are the spots where new contributors can make their first steps?

In the past months, we have got three new sources of MediaWiki community data:

Gerrit-stats is a prototype developed by the Wikimedia Foundation to retrieve data from our code repositories (read more).

The Wikimedia stats in Ohloh have been very useful to pool the data of hundreds of projects hosted in our own repositories and GitHub.

Our metrics reports are still a work in progress. Do you find these numbers helpful? What story do you think they tell? What other metrics would you like to see included? Your feedback and help is welcome!

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The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge.

The Wikimedia projects have an international scope, and the Wikimedia movement has already made a significant impact throughout the world. To continue this success on an organizational level, Wikimedia is building an international network of associated organizations.